Legend of Mana

I'll be upfront: I came into this one expecting a tight little action-RPG. What I got was something far stranger, far prettier, and considerably more frustrating than that. Legend of Mana HD Remaster is a 2021 re-release of Square's 1999 PlayStation oddity, and the honest answer to "is it worth buying" depends almost entirely on your tolerance for games that refuse to explain themselves. The headline mechanical hook is the Land Make system: you start with an empty world map and place artifact items on it to generate new towns, dungeons, and landscapes. Where you place each artifact relative to your home base affects enemy difficulty, and the order you place things can lock you out of certain quest chains entirely. The remaster does nothing to explain any of this, so if you go in blind, expect to eventually hit a FAQ. That's not a knock on the original's ambition, but it is a knock on Square's conservatism here. The crafting side is equally dense: you can forge weapons, build a golem companion, hatch monster eggs, play an instrument-based magic system, and grow a garden. Each of these is its own rabbit hole, and none of them come with a tutorial that makes sense until your third hour with it. Combat is where the age really shows. It's a side-scrolling brawler setup: light attacks, heavy attacks, weapon-specific special moves that eat your gauge, and a slightly odd four-directional movement system where you can only swing left or right. The hit detection is loose, enemy AI zips around in ways that make landing specials a crap-shoot, and companion AI, whether that's a hatched monster or a golem you've spent time building, ranges from "passable" to "actively embarrassing." The remaster does add a "Hell or No Future" difficulty toggle if you want something resembling a real fight, plus the option to disable random encounters entirely for pure exploration, which is actually a decent quality-of-life call. What the remaster absolutely nails is presentation. The painted HD backgrounds are stunning, fully redone for widescreen without feeling like an oil painting slapped over pixel art. The original sprites are kept intact and pop against those new backgrounds in a way that somehow works. Yoko Shimomura's original score has been re-arranged under her own supervision, and the new versions are genuinely excellent, though you can toggle back to the PS1 originals if that's your thing. You also get Ring Ring Land, a pet mini-game previously locked to Japanese PocketStation hardware, playable from the main menu, along with bonus gear that originally required specific save data from other Square titles. The community split on this one is real and has never healed. Fans of the original treat it like a rediscovered artifact. People arriving fresh from Trials of Mana or Secret of Mana tend to bounce off the floaty combat and the total absence of a coherent main narrative, which is structured as a loose anthology of vignettes you stumble across rather than a directed story with a villain you care about early on. The co-op is local only, max two players, and with two humans the game tips into trivially easy territory. There's no online play, so if you were hoping to run it with a friend remotely, that's a dead end.

Fred · Scout Team

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